Transforming Card Dealing with Machine Vision and Embedded Software

A traditional business from Sweden manufactures equipment for club and tournament bridge events. The business produces card dealing machines, sorting devices, boards, tables, playing cards and bidding boxes for bridge, and it caters towards providing their equipment for professional bridge event organizers.

One of the popular variations of club bridge plays is duplicate bridge. Each table and each team plays the exact arrangement of the 52 playing cards (a bridge deal). All the teams compete by playing identical deals, eliminating the element of luck this way, and are scored depending on their performance.

Historically, this was a manual process in which many stewards were required to duplicate a set of initially created deals for each table participating in a tournament. It used to be painstakingly long and prone to human mistakes. 

Enter the dealing and sorting machines, which are intended to automate the card dealing process, speed up the bridge deals duplication process and eliminate human errors. The first efforts to automate the card dealing process were made almost forty years ago. Since then, card dealing equipment has developed along with technological progress. Initially, bulky and cumbersome dealing machines with custom logic boards and hardcoded logic were gradually reduced in size down to a tabletop setup operated from a connected PC with special software. This solution allowed for significant cost savings due to a decrease in logistics requirements for bridge tournaments, considering the smaller dimensions of the equipment, the flexibility of the software running on the standard PC provided to the end users and lesser requirements towards the skills of personnel required to operate the system.

Nowadays, the further proliferation of mobile devices creates new calls for manufacturers of club and tournament bridge equipment, as the new mobile-first era requires relevant modern solutions even in the most conservative businesses.

We've become an IT partner to develop embedded software with a machine vision solution for card dealing devices and to move from Windows-based software to mobile-operated one.